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The Web Security Mailing List

Last 50 'Funny' Tagged Posts

I've worked in the security field in various roles (script kiddie, security researcher, incident response, application security engineer, security consultant, strategy, etc..) and thought I'd share a few points to those of you starting out in the security industry. Things are worse than you expect The reality is that companies, even large...

UPDATE: One of the authors has posted two responses including an apology (accepted). I was taught in grade school that if you plan on writing something, never plagiarize. If you want to republish portions of existing content ensure you properly quote/reference them, and never represent this content as your own original work....

A couple of people had asked me what are some things that you can do prior to attending hacker cons such as Blackhat and Defcon. Kurt Cobain said it best "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you'. Here's a short list (albeit not complete as I don't plan to...

Gawker was recently compromised and had its source code and user passwords leaked onto the web. The Wall Street Journal has published a list of the top 50 passwords with the #1 password being '123456'. The full list can be found at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/13/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/

An XSS worm has hit twitter this morning and appears to have affected hundreds of thousands of users. Sophos has a good technical writeup at http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/09/21/twitter-onmouseover-security-flaw-widely-exploited/ ARSTechnica has some coverage about Magnus Holm, the author of the worm. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/09/twitter-worms-spread-quickly-thanks-to-blatant-security-flaw.ars I'll update this post once a more accurate count of affected users is...

"A hack attack that can expose users to malware exploits has infected more than 1 million webpages, at least two of which belong to Apple. The SQL injection attacks bombard the websites of legitimate companies with database commands that attempt to add hidden links that lead to malware exploits. While most of...

In an April 1st shocker Robert "RSnake" Hansen (known in appsec circles as the prince of XSS) has just posted an entry on his site about his new gig at Google. "People tend to think of me as a Google hater, but the truth is the only thing I've hated about Google...

Someone has published an amusing cheat sheet that will allow you to fuzz barcode scanning systems for common input validation issues such as XSS and SQL Injection. They even provide an online barcode generator which allows you to create your own payloads. Not much else to say really :) Link: http://www.irongeek.com/xss-sql-injection-fuzzing-barcode-generator.php

An interview claiming to be with a facebook employee discusses a few things that you probably were hoping didn't happen. Here are some choice quotes from the article " Rumpus: Have you ever logged in to anyone’s account? Employee: I have. For engineering reasons. Rumpus: Have you ever done it outside of...

I don't usually post much about hacking incidents but this one was particularly funny. "A college student has been dropped from her classes twice, apparently the victim of someone who hacked into her schedule.Michelle McCoy-Lloyd was going to take two culinary classes at San Joaquin Delta College starting next week.Last month, someone...

"The Romanian hacker who successfully broke into a web site owned by security vendor Kaspersky Lab has struck again, this time exposing shortcomings in a Symantec web server. The hacker, known only as Unu, said in a blog post today that he was able to access a server belonging to the security...

There is a rather lengthy set of posts on using cloud based computing services as ideal venues for crypto and password cracking. Link: http://news.electricalchemy.net/2009/10/cracking-passwords-in-cloud.html Link: http://news.electricalchemy.net/2009/10/password-cracking-in-cloud-part-5.html

"What was essentially a typo last night resulted in the temporary disappearance from the Internet of almost a million Web sites in Sweden -- every address with a .se top-level down name. According to Web monitoring company Pingdom, which happens to be based in Sweden, the disablement of an entire top-level domain...

After checking out my favorite stocks this morning at finance.yahoo.com I saw an article titled 'best jobs in America' so figured I'd check it out. To my surprise Computer/Network Security Consultant was ranked as the 8th best job in the US. Very cool! Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/107932/best-jobs-in-america.html

UPDATE: Reddit has posted a blog entry at http://blog.reddit.com/2009/09/we-had-some-bugs-and-it-hurt-us.html addressing this. "Popular social news website Reddit has stopped the spread of a cross-site scripting (XSS) worm that hit the site on Monday. The XSS worm spread via comments on the site, originally from the account of a user called xssfinder. Reddit failed...

"A Russian security group has posted a detailed blog post about how they managed to extract the source code to over 3,300 websites. The group found that some of the largest and best known domains on the web, such as apache.org and php.net, amongst others, are vulnerable to an elementary information leak...

"The 4.0.207.0 release uses a reflective XSS filter that checks each script before it executes to check if the script appears in the request that generated the page. Should it find a match, the script will be blocked. According to Chromium developer Adam Barth, the developers plan to post an academic paper...

"Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and...

"Gary McKinnon has lost a judicial review against his extradition to the United States on hacking charges. Lawyers for the Briton hoped his recent diagnosis with Asperger's Syndrome would be enough to persuade judges to overturn previous rulings and allow McKinnon to be tried in the UK." - The Register Long story...

Just got back from vegas and finally started catching up. Looks like a fake ATM was placed at defcon (no surprise). "As the conference was kicking off a few days ago, attendees noticed that at ATM placed in the Riviera Hotel, which plays host to the annual event, didn't quite look right,...

"A claim of a software vulnerability in a program used to connect securely to servers across the Internet is likely a hoax, according to an analyst with the SANS Internet Storm Center. The program, called OpenSSH (Secure Shell), is installed on tens of millions of servers made by vendors such as Red...

"For years, government officials have urged consumers to protect their social security numbers by giving out the nine-digit codes only when absolutely necessary. Now it turns out that all the caution in the world may not be enough: New research shows that social security numbers can be predicted from publicly available birth...

"A former security guard for a Dallas hospital has been arrested by federal authorities for allegedly breaking into the facility's HVAC and confidential patient information computer systems. In a bizarre twist, he posted videos of his hacks on YouTube, and was trying to recruit other hackers to help him wage a massive...

"Iran's foreign ministry spokesman accused the cable network CNN of "officially" training people to "hack government and foreign ministry" websites on Monday, citing a CNN.com article that explained how hackers were launching distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Iranian government sites. "They officially trained the people to come and hack Iran's government websites,"...

"A URL-shortening service that condenses long Web addresses for use on micro-blogging sites like Twitter was hacked over the weekend, sending millions of users to an unintended destination, a security researcher said today. After Cligs, a rival to the better known TinyURL and bit.ly shortening services, was attacked Sunday, more than 2.2...

"Did you hear the one about the hacker-free e-mail service that was so confident about its enhanced security measure that it offered up $10,000 to anyone who could hack into it? It got hacked. Here’s the part that’s really crazy, though. There was initially some question as to whether or not the...

"For those who don't know of Astalavista, it was a popular website for "hackers" with relatively low-quality content. It started in 1994, and was one of the first search engines for computer security information. It hosted software exploits, and quickly degenerated into a forum for sharing software cracks, spyware, and virii. Yes...

"The site, which launched in 1996, covered all aspects of flight simulation, although its main focus was on Microsoft's Flight Simulator. The attack took down the site's two servers and the owners had not established an external backup system. The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, said that the site would be down for...

"A government audit (PDF) has pinpointed more than 3,800 vulnerabilities -- 763 of which are high-risk -- in the Federal Aviation Administration's Web-based air traffic control system applications, including some that could potentially put air travel at risk. The U.S. Department of Transportation report, with the help of auditors from KPMG, determined...

"McAfee, widely recognized as one of the leading providers of online security software for both home and business, appears to be struggling to secure its own Web sites, which at the time of writing this post, allow anyone with enough tech savvy to covertly do whatever they want on, and with, the...

Twitter has been hacked again and had it's administrative panel (which shouldn't be web accessible) breached. "This week, unauthorized access to Twitter was gained by an outside party. Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way. However, we discovered that 10 individual...

UPDATE: According to an updated Wired news story this is a sham and no hacker was involved. RSnake recently posted an entry linking to the write up on how a Cross-Site Request Forgery flaw in amazon was used to get Gay and Lesbian books banned from amazon's site via their reputation system....

UPDATE: F-Secure has posted more detailed information. "Some 24 hours after a worm spread advertising on Twitter, the popular social networking website, a second worm emerged on Sunday. Both worms appear to be created by Mikeyy Mooney, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn, New York. The first worm emerged on Saturday when Twitter profiles...

Netcraft firms that Lynx is gaining popularity due to the increase in browser security bugs. "Netcraft has observed a surge in popularity of the Lynx browser, particularly since the recent Pwn2Own competition, which was held at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver last month. During the course of the competition, security researchers once...

A new certification program has just been launched, and is brought to you by the same people who brought us ScanLessPCI "The Institute is the industry's leading authority for Certified ASS's. Our curriculum complies with the highest industry standards while still reflecting the operational realities of securing applications in the modern enterprise....

"Security researcher Charlie Miller held onto a vulnerability for an entire year, before using it on Wednesday to win $5,000 and an Apple laptop at the Pwn2Own contest here at the CanSecWest conference. Miller — a principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators — found two flaws in Apple's Safari Web browser more...

"The BBC hacked into 22,000 computers as part of an investigation into cybercrime but the move quickly backfired, with legal experts claiming the broadcaster broke the law and security gurus saying the experiment went too far. The technology show Click acquired a network of 22,000 hijacked computers - known as a botnet...

I just released a paper on an attack vector against certain transparent proxy architectures via the use of client side plugins with sockets support. If you've been reading this site for awhile you can probably tell that I frown upon new industry buzzwords and often make fun of new silly sounding terms....

I found the following post fairly amusing and had to link it here. "A few days ago I complained about the incredibly awkward IT Security Girl of the Year award that will be dished out later this year at the French IT security conference FRHACK. Apparently the FRHACK organizers did not like...

"What's Wikileaks, the net's foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site's confidential donors as a leaked document? That's exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced this week after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday...

"Who discovers the most security vulnerabilities? That’s one of the more frequent questions I’ve encountered over the past few years. Funnily enough there’s usually a high correlation between the timing of my being asked and the latest marketing blitzkrieg customers may have encountered (not from IBM of course). It seems that every...

"Defacement archive Zone-h.org has itself been defaced. The hack - claimed in the names of Cyber-Terrorist, HeLL cYbEr, and Jurm - involved posting a link to a YouTube video and dancing babies on the site's altered home page. The Arab language video, featuring an ad promoting nappies, replaced the site's usual content...

"A Romanian hacker site said on Wednesday it was able to breach the website of Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure just as it had gained access to the sites of two other security companies earlier in the week. F-Secure is "vulnerable to SQL Injection plus Cross Site Scripting," an entry on the HackersBlog...

A security lapse at Kaspersky has exposed a wealth of proprietary information about the anti-virus provider's products and customers, according to a blogger, who posted screen shots and other details that appeared to substantiate the claims. In a posting made Saturday, the hacker claimed a simple SQL injection gave access to a...

"In a post on Blogger on Saturday, a person who claims to have breached the Web site of open-source online community software phpBB gave a detailed account of how he did it. Using a vulnerability in PHPlist publicly disclosed on January 14, the attacker gained access to the password and configuration files...

"Transportation officials in Texas are scrambling to prevent hackers from changing messages on digital road signs after one sign in Austin was altered to read, "Zombies Ahead." Chris Lippincott, director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation, confirmed that a portable traffic sign at Lamar Boulevard and West 15th Street,...

"A widely-circulated URL which points to a image that purports to be a Wired.com story about Steve Jobs health is a hack job. We won't provide the URL here, but the Twitterverse quickly surmised that the item was not correct. As have Mashable and Gizmodo. I've written a number of stories about...

"MacRumors, one of the many sites which cover Apple's annual Macworld product launches, has had its live coverage infiltrated, with someone adding the false news of Steve Jobs's death to the blow-by-blow reports." Here's the very amusing screenshot of the incident. http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gawker/2009/01/macrumorshacked.jpg Read more: http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124580/hackers-post-faked-report-of-steve-jobss-death

From Twitter's blog "The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend. These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their...

"At Drexel University and a handful of other colleges, students created computer scripts to sway the contest—an online vote to nominate a university to receive its own clothing line—in their campuses’ favor. Tim Plunkett, a junior at Drexel, created a script that could cast 1,500 votes per second, according to The Daily...

"With the news that Google's Android shipped with an embarrassing security hole being followed by a simple two-step method to 'jailbreak' the OS, you'd think that the company had ironed out most of the remaining bugs – but you'd be wrong. According to ZDnet's Ed Burnette, the open-source Linux-based smartphone platform recently...

A new whitepaper 'Protecting a Web Application Against Attacks Through HTML Shared Files' discusses the risks of user uploaded HTML files. You'll notice this paper claims to have a 'patent pending' for the concept of splitting user uploaded files to another domain with a unique identifiers. "Many Web applications have a file-sharing...

"Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon has stormed into the Myspace charts with a music video about his empathy for a girl with the world on her shoulders. Called Only a fool, and owing something to soulful house boys Cabaret Voltaire, the song reached number five in the myspace video chart within 48 hours...

If you know me you know I don't like Atlanta and have many reasons (which I won't go into here). I have another one to add to this list after reading a story about Kevin Mitnick being detained for having lots of computer equipment with him. "In his luggage, they found a...

The full disclosure mailing list is usually 95% junk but every once in awhile an amusing/informative post gets through. Today an amusing post came through regarding a 'Worldwide SQL Protocol Advisory'. That's not to say this post isn't junk, but I found it amusing :) Here's a peek "II. Problem description The...

"Two weeks ago, when security researcher Dan Kaminsky announced a devastating flaw in the internet's address lookup system, he took the unusual step of admonishing his peers not to publicly speculate on the specifics. The concern, he said, was that online discussions about how the vulnerability worked could teach black hat hackers...

"A California man has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months -- a few pennies at a time. Michael Largent, of Plumas Lake, California, allegedly exploited a loophole in a common procedure both companies follow when a customer links...

"HACKERS have turned a bitchy blog about the world of women's magazines into a porn site. The blog by a mystery woman who calls herself “MagHag” has become a must-read for industry insiders, due to its salacious gossip about the editors of Madison, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Shop Til You Drop....

"Yes Cross Site Scripting (XSS) errors are all over the place. And YES they can affect very prominent web sites. The discussion forum area on Barackobama.com is allegedly the victim of a XSS exploit that redirected comments from Obama's site to....HillaryClinton.com. A hacker going by the alias of 'Mox' has claimed responsibility...

"Using a combination of fines and incentives the payment card brands have working hard to boost PCI-DSS compliance rates among merchants. Meanwhile, ASVs have been doing their part by offering their services at drastically reduced prices and curtailing the security checklist to make certification as easy as possible. Every merchant who signs...

Due to the increase in devastating vulnerabilities abusing AJAX and Google to hack the web more users are switching to 'safer' alternatives such as Gopher and Archie. Johnny Long was quoted as saying 'My next book on Archie hacking 'Jughead for idiots' will be out in late 2008 and I promise it...

"Unknown miscreants had a good time two weekends ago when they posted hundreds of flashing animated images onto discussion boards hosted by the Landover, Md.-based Epilepsy Foundation. Flashing lights or bold moving patterns can trigger often violent seizures among 3 percent of the estimated 50 million epileptics worldwide. "I was on the...

"A security lapse on Facebook has allowed its users to gain access to vast libraries of private photographs, including one of Paris Hilton drinking beer with her friends. A Canadian hacker exploited a recent upgrade to the networking site's privacy settings to view pictures that were intended to be private, including some...

TrendMicro had its website sql injected and malware uploaded. A simple google search for 'fuckjp.js' shows trendmicro listed. "A Trend Micro spokesman confirmed that the company's site had been hacked Thursday, saying that the attack took place earlier in the week. "A portion of our site -- some pages were attacked," said...

The RIAA website was apparently vulnerable to a SQL Injection vulnerability and had it's website deleted. "It’s a weekend, and a holiday weekend to boot, so the site might stay this way for some time. Someone apparently used SQL injection to wipe, and we do mean wipe, the website of the Recording...

Security vendor F-Secure was defaced a few days ago by a turkish defacement crew. "So how did this happen? The server itself is quite well hardened, but the web forum software had an unannounced security patch silently released by the vendor nine days ago. The defacement gang learned of the vulnerability and...

"Introducing himself as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the actual president of Iceland, Atlason found President George W. Bush's allegedly secret telephone number and phoned, requesting a private meeting with him. "I just wanted to talk to him, have a chat, invite him to Iceland and see what he'd say," Vífill told ABC News....

United States Patent 7266699 was issued to AppSecInc. From the patent "The invention provides a transparent encryption infrastructure which allows the user to point-and-click on columns and tables to encrypt data. The creation of triggers and views are also easily implemented, to encrypt and decrypt data, to manage the encryption keys and...

From the nypost " A hacker faces up to three years in prison for making the Polish president's Web page turn up in searches for the slang word for "penis." Marek W., 23, has been charged with insulting President Lech Kaczynski. Marek created a program that caused the official home page of...

This list was created based off of real security vendor interactions that I and a friend have experienced. 1.Customer: Have you had a security evaluation of your product? Vendor: Yes, Kevin Mitnick has performed a pen test against our product. (sorry kevin! :) 2. The vendor comes to your office and pitches...

As a Diablo2 fan I just had to post this. " Blizzard's Warcraft.net and Battle.net websites have recently come under attack from an Algerian hacker who went by the name of "LeHackeur". This hacker added an extra file on the sites' main servers, which displayed an image of a skull, as well...

"A patent infringement lawsuit recently filed by Cenzic against SPI Dynamics has Web application security companies and researchers on edge. If successful, the suit -- which centers around Cenzic's patent on a Web application vulnerability scanning technology -- could mean trouble for other scanner vendors, as well as researchers who develop scanning...

UPDATE: Her myspace page was linked off of defconpics.org and shortly after has been removed from myspace. No word on how it was removed at this time. An NBC reporter (Michelle Madigan Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) was found to be trying to find hackers for hire and recording them with a...

""While browsing around the Fox News website, I found that directory indexes are turned on. So, I started following the tree up, until I got to /admin. Eventually, I found my way into /admin/xml_parser/zdnet/, in which, there is a shell script. Seeing as it's a shell script, and I use Linux, I...

Popular Science has voted 'Microsoft Security Grunt' as the 6th worst job in science to have. "Do you flinch when your inbox dings? The people manning secure@microsoft .com receive approximately 100,000 dings a year, each one a message that something in the Microsoft empire may have gone terribly wrong. Teams of Microsoft...

I monitor google news for anything application security related and found the following announced today by Cenzic. "the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has issued the company U.S. Patent No. 7,185,232, focused on fault injection technology, which is commonly used by most security assessment scanners." - Cenzic Cenzic is not the...

"2007 is a very special year for the global hacker community. Thanks to cooperation between the organizers of DefCon XV and the Chaos Communications Camp 2007, the two largest gatherings of hackers from around the world happen only a few days apart! This is where "Hackers on a Plane" comes in: The...

"According to an alert posted on The Pirate Bay's blog, the stolen user credentials were encrypted but the site is still urging users to immediately change usernames and passwords to avoid the risk of identity theft. They have got a copy of the user database. That is, your username and passwords. But,...

"Just last week BioFilm, the maker of the popular sexual lubricant Astroglide, confirmed that it had failed to properly secure the names and addresses of more than 250,000 individuals who requested free samples which resulted in those files showing up in a Google search for those individuals' names. Now THREAT LEVEL reader...

"The man responsible for unleashing what is believed to be the first self-propagating cross-site scripting worm has pleaded guilty in Los Angeles Superior Court to charges stemming from his most infamous hacking. Samy Kamkar, who was 19 when he unleashed the attack on MySpace.com in October 2005, was sentenced to three years...

Apparently Stefan Esser (a key player in PHP's Security Response Team) has called it quits. Steffen is known for finding various vulnerabilities in PHP and working with the PHP Security team to identify and prevent issues in PHP itself. From his blog (Mirroring since his site appears to be getting slammed hard):...

5. The vendor's idea of a patch process involves you editing line X and replacing it with new code 4. The amount of total downloads is less than the application's age 3. It isn't running on the vendors homepage 2. The readme file states that you need to chmod a certain file...

For various reasons I'm going to report this as neutral as possible. Apparently F5 and Acunetix both web security vendors were found to have XSS holes in their website according to RSnake's forum. To be honest with you yeah it is embarrassing but s!@# happens however that isn't why I'm posting this...

"Kevin Mitnick, the notorious former hacker turned security consultant and tech celebrity, has been targeted by Pakistani crackers in a series of web face defacements attacks. Four websites associated with Mitnick's various ventures were sprayed with digital graffiti on Monday in an apparently personal attack. The sites defensivethinking.com, mitsec.com, kevinmitnick.com and mitnicksecurity.com...

CERT has issued a warning against a new web based threat entitled a "Cross HTTP Response Splitting Session Fixation Smuggling Scripting Vulnerability". According to the founder of DSHIELD Johannes Ullrich "If on April 1st you have specific non default settings in Internet Explorer, visit a serious of 4 specific websites in order...

Securityfocus home of bugtraq and other important security mailing lists was defaced today by the attacker known as "Fluffi Bunni". This is probably the best known security site on the net and proof anything can be breached if one spends enough time. According to defaced.alldas.de the advertising company was defaced and fed...

A very well known computer security website and training center has been defaced. The defacer known as "Fluffi Bunni" is well known for attacks against apache.org, sourceforge, and exodus to name a few. You can read more about his past attacks in the old news section of this site. Sans.org Mirror listed...